When you get up in the early morning, more or less you had some dream in your sleep. Since a self is already generated, some efforts are needed to kill that self.

Once get up, wake up. Once wake up, get up. Try to be awake and do things fast after you get up. Do things nicely and fast. Don’t make any decisions. You can leave those decisions until later. Keep things simple. Brush your teeth and get ready for the day.

We human being live in a limited form. So this kind of daily practice is important in keeping us awake and reaching perfection. As I grow up and keep gaining experience with human life, I developed my ways to keep myself efficient and energetic throughout the whole day. The first time I went to a Zen monastery, I felt very excited there because everything there is the same as how I figured out how to live my daily life. A lot of people complain about the various rules in the monastery. I feel like home. The Zen monastery, to me, is not a place to escape from life, but a place to teach you how to live your life. The ways of sleep, eat, work, and so on are all consistent with how I live my life in the human world. For example, I only sleep 6 hours a day and get up very early in the morning. Through my life, I have figured out this as the most efficient way for me. 6 hours is minimum for me. If I go lower than 6 hours, I will feel my energy drained slowly over a long period of time. But with 6 hours of sleep, I can do that for years. (Later I learned that scientifically 6 hours is a minimum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Optimal_amount_in_humans).

Killing yourself in the early morning will get you started for a good day of work. It is part of Buddhism practice to learn how to kill your self when you see it. After you kill yourself, you still need to rely on your feels to do the activities in your life. Those feels are your true self. Or we can call them love.